1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is in the field of electronic services including telephony and Web-based services, and pertains particularly to methods for rules-based servicing of customers based on a combination of history, current status, and dynamic Web analytics.
2. Discussion of the State of the Art
In the field of electronic services, service organizations are continually developing new and better ways of servicing customers. State-of-art contact centers represent a vanguard of service for medium and larger service organizations, including financial institutions, product retailers, insurance service organizations, consumer service organizations, and so on.
A contact center or a federation of contact centers may be organized to handle new business, customer service, technical support, outbound sales, customer relations management (CRM), and customer billing and account management services. All of these may be performed by one center or several centers may be organized to provide these services.
State-of-art contact centers typically include interactive voice response (IVR) services for customers to engage in self-help. Telephone contact services are provided for live assistance. Electronic messaging services are provided such as email, short message service (SMS), multimedia message service (MMS), instant message service (IMS), and chat services. Web services are also typically provided and are integrated to some degree with the other mentioned services.
Live assistance generally involves contact center agents who are typically connected to a local area network (LAN) via personal computer (PC) with a graphics user interface (GUI) and in some cases an Internet protocol (IP) telephone. PBX systems, email routing systems, CTI servers, telephony switching facilities, chat servers, conference bridges, and other service nodes and systems are usually part of such apparatus.
Contact centers maintain customer information and contact center information in one or more databases such as a customer relations management (CRM) database, billing database, product information database, etc. Live agents and automated attendants (voice applications/Web-based services) may access data typically by performing database lookups to obtain the required data for any interaction. In a contact center system known to the inventor information about a customer is typically available to automated systems at the time of interaction and may be made available to live agents ahead of routing. Maintaining interaction history, analyzing interaction behavior, and statistical data mining are typical in state-of-art centers.
A problem with customer servicing arises whenever some process, state, or result fails to satisfy the goal of the customer. Contact center application developers are constantly tweaking and refining applications and processes to better service the customer. One challenge that persists in many contact center environments is the challenge of organizing services and data management in a way that reduces redundance of data aggregation and repetition of processes within the center.
Current best practices in contact center data aggregation and management still do not consider data entry into the system as a result of customer interaction. That is to say that often customers must re-enter data several times during routine business with the service organization. One reason for this is a lack of orchestration between data centers managed within the contact center environment. Different departments may each have separate records and histories of a customer, such as automated service records and receipts versus customer demographic data versus customer complaint history and so on.
Centralized data stores may be provided wherein all of the center data is stored in one location. The difficulty with this approach alone is that many contact center environments are federated and data stores are regionally separated from one another. Another problem is difficulty managing all of the different types of data in one robust system. Still another problem is the absence of system intelligence for interpreting data with relevance to providing unique customer solutions more efficiently.
It has occurred to the inventor that if each point of possible customer access to the contact center shared a common platform that included access to all of the center business rules and all of the center data, then more efficient and intelligent interaction with a customer might result. Therefore, what is clearly needed is a system and methods for tracking unresolved customer interaction with a service organization and automatically formulating a dynamic service solution that takes into account the original goal of the customer.